China Billionaire Invests $1.6 Billion in London Land, Boats

June 19 (Bloomberg) -- Dalian Wanda Group, the Chinese
developer controlled by billionaire Wang Jianlin, is investing 1
billion pounds ($1.6 billion) in a British yachtmaker and a
London site to build Western Europe’s tallest residential tower.

Wanda will spend 700 million pounds on a 62-story luxury
hotel and apartment building on the land on the South Banks of
the Thames. It also agreed to pay 320 million pounds to buy 92
percent of Sunseeker International Ltd. whose yachts have been
featured in James Bond movies, it said in a statement today.

London has emerged as a haven for foreign wealth, with the
pound’s decline attracting investors from Malaysia to Russia to
developments like Battersea Power Station, where about half of
the project’s apartments have been sold in overseas markets.
Chinese developers, including China Vanke Co., also are
expanding overseas to take advantage of demand for real estate
abroad from increasingly rich nationals.

“Investments in London despite being perceived as much
safer than Shanghai, still carry higher yields,” said James
Macdonald, head of China research at Savills in Shanghai. “A
weak sterling has made investments comparatively cheap for
overseas investors, especially for Chinese.”

The pound has lost about 37 percent against the yuan since
the middle of June 2007.

Tallest Building

Wanda will erect the tallest residential building in
Western Europe, at 205 meters (673 feet), on the site upstream
from the Houses of Parliament, Stephen Vernon, executive
Chairman of Green Properties, the seller of the site, said in an
interview today. It is in one of the clusters where tall
buildings can be constructed in the city in an area called Nine
Elms, he said.

Western Europe’s tallest residential tower is the 190-meter
HSB Turning Torso in Malmo, Sweden, according to the Skyscraper
Center website of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban
Habitat.

Luxury Hotels

The number of millionaires in China has climbed 4 percent
from 12 months earlier to 2.8 million, according to the Hurun
Research Institute’s findings this year.

“Chinese consumption, particularly high-end consumption is
booming,” Wang told reporters in Beijing. Five of six private
jets at a General Dynamics Corp. Gulfstream factory in the U.S.,
where Wanda bought a plane last year, were earmarked for China,
he added.

Wanda plans to expand its investment in the U.K. and build
luxury hotels in eight to 10 cities globally, Wang said. The
company may announce more overseas investments next year, and
investors will have a chance to buy Wanda shares in future, he
said, without giving a time period for an initial public
offering of the closely held company.

Manhattan was the top choice for Chinese investment in
overseas properties in the past two years and $2.1 billion was
spent, according to Real Capital Analytics data. London was in
the No. 2 spot with total investment of $2 billion, the data
show.

Sunseeker

Wanda decided to buy Sunseeker because it is building three
yacht clubs in China and each needs at least 10 yachts, Wang
said.

Sunseeker sold about 190 boats in Asia, excluding
Australia, in the past decade, with more than 60 percent of the
purchases coming from China including Hong Kong, Gordon Hui,
chairman of Sunseeker Asia said in an interview this month. A
lowest-priced Portofino 40 cruiser costs about five million yuan
($815,000) and the most expensive model costs as much as 230
million yuan, Hui said.

ABP (China) Holdings Group Ltd., a Beijing-based Chinese
developer, last month signed an agreement with London officials
to transform the 35-acre (14-hectare) site at Royal Albert Dock
into the capital’s third business district after the City of
London and Canary Wharf.

Malaysia’s SP Setia Bhd. and Sime Darby Bhd. bought the
site of London’s Battersea Power Station, featured on the cover
of Pink Floyd’s 1977 album “Animals,” for 400 million pounds
in July last year.

Military Family

Vanke, China’s biggest developer by sales, in February
signed a deal with Tishman Speyer Properties LP, the owner of
New York’s Rockefeller Center, to develop residential towers in
San Francisco.

Wang, 58, is ranked 166, with a net worth of $7.4 billion,
on the Bloomberg Billionaire’s list. He was born to a military
family in western China’s Sichuan province and served for 16
years in the People’s Liberation Army before he was honorably
discharged, according to Bloomberg Billionaires.

He later took a job at an indebted residential developer
affiliated with the district government, changed the company’s
name to Dalian Wanda and became the general manager in 1992.
During the next 20 years, he developed Wanda into a diversified
company with interests in commercial property development,
tourism, entertainment and department store chains.